H-1B visas hot topic in immigration debate

Left to right, Suryama Naik a Senior Development Engineer, David Johnson President and CEO of Achates Power, and Dr Brian Callahan discuss Air Flow through one of the company's engines. Naik was sponsored on a H1-B Visa and went through the process and currently has green card status.
— Sean M. Haffey

Left to right, Suryama Naik a Senior Development Engineer, David Johnson President and CEO of Achates Power, and Dr Brian Callahan discuss Air Flow through one of the company's engines. Naik was sponsored on a H1-B Visa and went through the process and currently has green card status.
— Sean M. Haffey

High-tech companies and universities in San Diego County and nationwide are tracking the immigration-reform debate in Washington.

Their interest? Significantly raising the annual caps on the number of visas for high-skilled foreigners to work in the United States, streamlining the bureaucratic process that companies must navigate to hire such employees and lessening the restrictions placed on scientists, engineers, computer programmers and others with these visas.

Yes
42% (59)

No
58% (80)

139 total votes.

While congressional lawmakers, other political leaders and advocacy groups have focused mainly on what to do with the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country and how to better secure the nation’s borders, those in high-tech industries said their visa component is equally important to the country, particularly its economy.

The discussion is expanding with just weeks to go before the application filing period for H-1B visas in 2014 begins on April 1. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services allocates 65,000 H-1B visas annually, with an additional 20,000 for people with advanced degrees.

This year the cap is expected to be reached within the first week. It took two months to hit the limit last year, and the year before that it took until November. In 2007 and 2008, before the Great Recession really took hold, the cap was reached on the first filing day — April 1.

“Even if you have the most highly qualified employee, the most sought-after employee from a foreign country, you can’t guarantee anything,” said Justin Storch, manager of agency liaison for the American Council on International Personnel, a membership organization in Washington, D.C., for companies with at least 500 employees and one office abroad.

Industry leaders said the lack of qualified citizens in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — pushes companies to hire foreign workers or to try to help international students with advanced degrees from U.S. colleges stay in the country.

For those who want to start a business, a different visa is required — but the application procedure and the odds for obtaining that visa are similarly challenging.

“To have this immigration policy is really silly, and it’s hurting us,” said Martina Musteen, a professor in the College of Business Administration at San Diego State University. Musteen’s focus is international entrepreneurship.

“It’s a known fact that immigrants have always been important for innovation and for starting new businesses in the U.S.,” she said. “The barriers to it don’t make any sense.”

Opponents of raising the visa caps said the problem is less about qualified employees as it is about cheap foreign labor.

Norman Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California Davis, said foreign workers are paid less, lack some rights that U.S. citizens possess and have less career mobility because their visas are tied to their current employer.

“By far, the most important reform would be to fix the definition of the legally required wage for hiring H-1Bs,” he said. “Currently, the legal definition is full of loopholes that allow employers to legally underpay foreign workers.”

Executives at scientific and high-tech businesses said they pay fair wages and invest time and additional resources in foreign workers because they truly need them. The average cost of sponsoring a worker for an H-1B visa is about $3,000.

“Companies are not doing this on a whim,” Storch said.

Judy Ohrn Hicks, senior vice president of human resources at Accelrys in Sorrento Valley, has five applications ready to be filed next month. She almost had six, but ruled out a candidate for a job that had to filled quickly. That’s because people who apply on April 1 and are granted an H-1B visa cannot begin work until Oct. 1.

“We (are) a small company, but we need to be globally competitive,” Ohrn Hicks said. “There has to be intelligent and commercial discussion around it. This is not a political issue, this is an economic and business issue.”

Accelrys makes software to help companies manage their operations. About 10 percent of its 650 workers currently hold H-1B visas — including computer scientists, engineers, chemists and biologists — and many more started out with such a visa.

At Achates Power, which is developing a fuel-efficient, low-cost and sustainable internal-combustion engine, about 10 percent of the 50 workers hold H-1B visas and about one-third were born abroad, said David Johnson, president and CEO.

“Anything that can be done to make (the visa process) faster and more flexible and more real-world is greatly appreciated,” Johnson said. He was once prohibited from sending an Indian employee to his native country for business because of H-1B restrictions, even though he was the best man for the assignment.

In previous years, Congress has tried to address businesses’ concerns but could not pass related legislation. Now, several ideas are being floated that could become part of a comprehensive immigration bill:

•The Staple Act: would give a green card to foreign students when they earn at least a master’s degree in the United States.

•The Immigration Innovation Act: would increase the annual H-1B cap from 65,000 to a range of 115,000 to 300,000 depending on the economy. Also would allow unlimited H-1B visas for graduates with qualified advanced degrees.

•The Start Up Act 3.0: would give entrepreneur visas to certain people who can raise capital, launch a company in the United States and hire at least five U.S. workers.

“By doing these things, you’ll see more innovation going on,” said Alexander Wallin, a Swedish graduate of the University of California San Diego and founder of Sprinklebit, a social investment platform.

Wallin started his company while he was in college and was able to stay in the U.S. for one year after graduation. He applied for a special visa for entrepreneurs and said the process was long and expensive, partly because the government lost his paperwork. Wallin eventually had to leave the country so he would not fall out of legal status.

For five months, he tried to manage his company from Stockholm, Sweden. He returned to San Diego last month.

“Because I could not be here,” he said, “we lost two to three months of development time.”